Tip of the Week #170 – Using OneNote to Convert Images to Text

Tip of the Week #170 – Use OneNote to Convert Images to Text (OCR)

Developer Rikard Hult brings us this week’s helpful tip.

If you have a scanned document as a .pdf or an image, you could use Microsoft OneNote to convert it to plain, editable text.

What is OneNote? It’s one of the many apps in the Microsoft Office Suite of products, available for free on every major desktop and mobile computing platform, including Mac. OneNote is your digital notebook, a far more sophisticated version of the old Notepad text editor. It lets you create multiple notebooks which you can divide into sections and pages, organizing thoughts and ideas, lists, schedules, etc. You can also use OneNote to collaborate and share with other users.

To use OneNote’s built-in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to convert an image to plain text, simply take a screenshot of the text you want to process.

Paste the screenshot into OneNote and then right click and select “Copy Text from Picture.”